Less begins to breath unevenly.
She turns to him: “What if one day you meet someone, Arthur, and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetize every fucking book or organize the dishwasher in some way you just can’t live with. It’s because they aren’t this person. This woman Janet met. Maybe you can go through your whole life and never meet them, and think love is all these other things, but if you do meet them, God help you! Because then: ka-blam! You’re screwed. The way Janet is. She ruined our life for it! But what if that’s real?” She is gripping the chair now.
“Zohra, I’m so sorry.”
“Is it like that with this Freddy?”
“I…I…”
“The brain is so wrong, all the time,” she says, turning to the dark landscape again. “Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.”
This insanity, the insanity of her lover, has her bewildered and hurt and incandescent. And yet what she has said—the lying brain—this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.
“What is love, Arthur? What is it?” she asks him. “Is it the good dear thing I had with Janet for eight years? Is it the good dear thing? Or is it the lightning bolt? The destructive madness that hit my girl?”
“It doesn’t sound happy” is all he can say.
She shakes her head. “Arthur, happiness is bullshit. That is the wisdom I give you from my twenty-two hours of being fifty. That is the wisdom from my love life. You’ll understand at midnight.” It is clear she is drunk. Outside, the shivering bartender smokes like he means it. She sniffs the glass of marc and says, “My Georgian grandmother used to make booze just like this.”
It keeps ringing in his ears: Is it the good dear thing? Is it the good dear thing?
“Yes.” She smiles at the memory and sniffs the glass. “It smells just like my grandmother’s cha-cha!”
The cha-cha proves too much for the birthday girl, and by eleven thirty, he and Mohammed are leading her up to her room as she smiles and thanks them. He puts her, happily drunk, to bed. She is speaking French to Mohammed, who comforts her in the same language and then again in English. As Less tucks her in, she says, “Well, that was ridiculous, Arthur, I’m sorry.” As he closes her door, he realizes that he will spend his fiftieth birthday alone.
He turns; not alone.
“Mohammed, how many languages do you speak?”
“Seven!” he says brightly, striding to the elevator. “I learn from school. They make fun of my Arabic when I come to the city, it is old-fashioned, I learned in Berber school, so I work more hard. And from tourists! Sorry, still learning English. And you, Arthur?”
“Seven! My God!” The elevator is completely mirrored, and as the doors close, Less is confronted by a vision: infinite Mohammeds in red polo shirts beside infinite versions of his father at fifty, which is to say himself. “I…I speak English and German—”
“Ich auch!” says Mohammed. The following is translated from the German: “I lived for two years in Berlin! Such boring music!”
“I have been coming from there! Is excellent your German!”
“And yours is good. Here we are, you first, Arthur. Are you ready for your birthday?”
“I am fear of the age.”
“Don’t be frightened. Fifty is nothing. You’re a handsome man, and healthy, and rich.”
He wants to say he is not rich but stops himself. “How many year have you?”
“I’m fifty-three. You see, it’s nothing. Nothing at all. Let’s get you a glass of champagne.”
“I am fear of the old, I am fear of the lonely.”
“You have nothing to fear.” He turns to a woman who has taken over the station behind the bar, easily his height with her hair in a ponytail, and speaks to her in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. Perhaps he is asking for champagne for the American, who has just turned fifty. The bartender beams at Less, raises her eyebrows, and says something. Mohammed laughs; Less just stands with his idiot’s grin. “Happy birthday, sir,” she says in English, pouring out a glass of French champagne. “This is my treat.”
Less offers to buy Mohammed a drink, but the man will indulge only in energy drinks. Not because of Islam, he explains; he is agnostic. “Because alcohol makes me crazy. Crazy! But I smoke hashish. Would you like?”
“No, no, not tonight. It makes me crazy. Mohammed, are you really a tour guide?”
“I must to make a living,” Mohammed says, suddenly shy in his English. “But in truth, I am writer. Like you.”
How does Less get the world so wrong? Over and over again? Where is the exit from moments like this? Where is the donkey door out?
“Mohammed, I am honored to be with you tonight.”
“I am very great fan of Kalipso. Of course, I read not the English but the French. I am honored to be with you. And happy birthday, Arthur Less.”
Probably now Tom and Freddy are packing their bags; they are many hours ahead, after all, and in Tahiti it is midday. Surely the sun is already hammering the beach like a tinsmith. The grooms are folding their linen shirts, their linen pants and jackets, or surely Freddy is folding them. He recalls Freddy was always the packer, while Less lounged on the hotel sofa. “You’re too fast and sloppy,” Freddy said that last morning in Paris. “And everything comes out wrinkled—see, watch this.” He spread out the jackets and shirts on the bed like they were clothes for a great paper doll, placed the pants and sweaters on top, and folded the whole thing up in a bundle. Hands on his hips, he smiled in triumph (by the way, everyone is completely naked in this scene). “And now what?” Less asked. Freddy shrugged: “Now we just put it in the luggage.” But of course this bolus was too large for the luggage to swallow, no matter how Freddy coaxed it, and after many tries of sitting and pressing, he eventually remade it into two packages, which he fit neatly into two bags. Victorious, he looked smugly at Less. Framed in the window, with that lean silhouette from his early forties, the spring Paris rain dotting the window behind him, Freddy’s former lover nodded and asked, “Mr. Pelu, you’ve packed everything; now what are we going to wear?” Freddy attacked him in a fury, and for the next half an hour, they wore nothing at all.
Yes, surely Mr. Pelu is folding.
Surely this is why he never calls to wish Less a happy birthday.